Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, 2023)

[dadaistnun]

Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool

[DarkImbecile]

Brandon Cronenberg's first two features have been sitting in my kevyip for years now, but I'll be rectifying that soon after having a blast with Infinity Pool: plenty of lesser movies can indulge in deliriously psychedelic aesthetics and withering critiques of entitled, hedonistic wealth, but this one is also a bracing character study with a truly sharp sense of humor.

Built around a very fun performance from Alexander Skarsgård and a fantastic femme fatale turn from Mia Goth, the sudden reigning queen of cult horror, Cronenberg's fable is set on a Mediterranean resort island in a fictional country with some unique cultural artifacts and a very fundamentalist view of justice. After Skarsgård's struggling writer, James, and his wife bump into Goth and her husband, a momentary lapse on his part opens his eyes to a new world of extreme indulgence; Cronenberg capably orchestrates a gradual reveal of the insecurities, inadequacies, and hunger that lies under James' mask of upper-class blandness, and also steadily dials up the intensity on the film's hallucinatory imagery and sonic weirdness to mirror his descent into some truly depraved places.

I've seen some complaints that too many of Cronenberg's provocations and shocking or surreal images are empty of the kind of meaning his father embeds into his own work, and while I don't deny that you can detect a bit of shallowness underneath some of the conceptual structures here, in my book the younger Cronenberg's proficiency at delivering highly stylized overstimulation and indelible images more than balances that out. If you can get on board with the levels of sex, violence, bodily fluids, and sonic/visual overload, this is a hell of a fun time, and one that makes me excited to explore the rest of Cronenberg's filmography and his future.

[therewillbeblus]

Brandon Cronenberg's first two features have been sitting in my kevyip for years now, but I'll be rectifying that soon after having a blast with Infinity Pool: plenty of lesser movies can indulge in deliriously psychedelic aesthetics and withering critiques of entitled, hedonistic wealth, but this one is also a bracing character study with a truly sharp sense of humor.

Built around a very fun performance from Alexander Skarsgård and a fantastic femme fatale turn from Mia Goth, the sudden reigning queen of cult horror, Cronenberg's fable is set on a Mediterranean resort island in a fictional country with some unique cultural artifacts and a very fundamentalist view of justice. After Skarsgård's struggling writer, James, and his wife bump into Goth and her husband, a momentary lapse on his part opens his eyes to a new world of extreme indulgence; Cronenberg capably orchestrates a gradual reveal of the insecurities, inadequacies, and hunger that lies under James' mask of upper-class blandness, and also steadily dials up the intensity on the film's hallucinatory imagery and sonic weirdness to mirror his descent into some truly depraved places.

I've seen some complaints that too many of Cronenberg's provocations and shocking or surreal images are empty of the kind of meaning his father embeds into his own work, and while I don't deny that you can detect a bit of shallowness underneath some of the conceptual structures here, in my book the younger Cronenberg's proficiency at delivering highly stylized overstimulation and indelible images more than balances that out. If you can get on board with the levels of sex, violence, bodily fluids, and sonic/visual overload, this is a hell of a fun time, and one that makes me excited to explore the rest of Cronenberg's filmography and his future.

I didn't like this as much as you did, but I also liked it precisely because Cronenberg was disinterested in beating us over the head with the satirical elements. I can understand those supposed complaints if the picture was taking half-measures as a critique, but I don't think it is. Rather, the film is reflexively as thematically hollow as Skarsgård's character is (and, really all of the 'characters are'). Their inner 'selves' don't matter, and spoonfeeding us some embellished investment in a lucid high concept regarding class would only serve to validate the worth of exploring such empty souls. So Cronenberg intelligently subverts expectations here, and plays to both his strengths and interests by crafting a fever dream that amplifies character as defined by external performance only, thereby masking character development as signified by inner value, which may as well not even be there

SpoilerShow

and ends by leaving our vapid 'protagonist' on the doorstep, no closer to knowing himself than he's ever been, and no more understood by us than he ever was or deserves to be

So, in this sense, I suppose Skarsgård is perfectly cast, as I've found his pigeonholed insipid starring roles and performances of late to be uniformly terrible. He shines in more idiosyncratic parts, like The East, Diary of a Teenage Girl, and the recent brief comedic stint in Riget: Exodus, but I don't think anything about his effort is "fun" here. His author may be the most boring character he's played yet, rivaling the viking in The Northman. But at least here, his latest populist miscasting that plays to his thespian weaknesses works as a cheeky in-joke - he's a handsome man, born into fame, out of his element working in these environments. The film belongs to Mia Goth, who has proven that she can flaunt this kind of 'character' better than anyone working right now, and she may as well be co-auteur as the internal DJ whose unpredictably arrhythmic behavior seems to bring the film to the pitch Cronenberg is looking for but limited to with his aesthetic tools.